Mind tricks

In 1991 a rap group in the United States of America (Geto boys) released a CD single titled my mind is playing tricks on me. It got to number twenty three on the Billboard Hot hundred and was described as one of the best hip hop songs in the nineties. In the song the group describe different various mental states of stress disorder. Interestingly it was the group’s only number one single till date. While as a young teenager I found some of the verses hilarious, looking back now I realised it was talking about some things deeper than I knew at the time.

The first verse talks about someone who feels he is being followed and constantly stays alert to prevent himself from being attacked. In the next verse the singer keeps looking over his shoulder thinking nemesis is about to catch up him for some people that he may have had wronged. And then the next talks about people trying to rip him off his money off his money. The more people tried to help him the more he felt they were trying to cheat him. Eventually he drove everyone away including his wife who truly he now realised never did him any wrong. In the last verse, the singer was actually fighting an invisible enemy and realised there was no one there but by then he had bloodied hands from punching the concrete.

In the lyrics of the song, you can tell that each of the people singing was paranoid. They all suffered serious delusions that affected the actions they took and resulted in grave consequences. According to the dictionary, being paranoid is feeling extremely nervous and worried because you believe that other people do not like you or are trying to harm you. In specialized psychology they say people who are paranoid are those are suffering from a mental illness in which they believe that people are trying to harm them. Steve Bressert said people with paranoid, generally have a personality disorder and are characterized by having a long-standing pattern of distrust and always suspicious of others. Such people always believe that other people’s motives are suspect or even malevolent.

While a paranoid is someone who believes people are conspiring against him or her, an inverse paranoid on the other hand is a person who is convinced that the world is conspiring to make him or her successful. People like this interprete everything that happens to them like part a grand design that will eventually lead to their success. They believe the world is contriving to do them good. No matter how dire the situation is, their interpretation is always the reverse. While this might not always be the case, their interpretation of the situation at hand always keeps them going and changing their mindset about what is happening.

While most people are quick to complain about everything that is not going right, others change the problem into an opportunity or see it as a challenge that they are willing to take. Instead of focusing on the bad that can come out of a situation, their response is always positive and constructive. For business people, they tend to find ways in which they can swing to action and benefit from the seeming problems that have arisen. It is important you take control of the things that you allow into your mind. Like they say you can’t prevent a bird from flying over your head but you can stop it from making a nest. While many things might be in the air you can choose what to breathe and also when to block your nose from inhaling toxic substances. When you take charge you can decide how to manage the things that have come in.

In the illustration commonly used about the glass being half full or half empty, I heard someone say the most important thing to check before drinking the water was whether it was clean. In the same vein, while the pessimist says the glass is half full and the optimist says it is half empty, the opportunists goes past both parties and drinks the water. It all depends on your perception. We all have filters that help us perceive things from different lights. Depending on what we have, perception filters misdirect the senses around itself or the person using it. They have a way of directing attention away from the object or the bearer rendering unnoticeable. People of high intelligence most times are immune from the effects.